


The Wall Parable

by thett



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Barebacking, Bottom Lio Fotia, Established Relationship, Galo is here to help, How To Give A Guy An Explosive Orgasm Without Even Touching His Penis, Lio misses his flame, M/M, PWP, Post-Canon, Spoilers, Top Galo Thymos, with a little bit of drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 04:48:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21030497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thett/pseuds/thett
Summary: is there a flame in the bottom of the lake?





	The Wall Parable

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Тени на стене](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26463331) by [thett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thett/pseuds/thett). 

> it seems I could watch this movie on repeat, or at least write about what I think of these guys on repeat. (and what I think they do is fuck, and they do that a lot)  
also, in my headcanon they do switch. can't argue with the movie.

Lio Fotia sat on the lakeshore and looked at the water. Behind his back a dense wall of pines supported the starry sky. Lio took a fancy to the distant coast not by chance: even though it lay through a long verdurous way from the road, but the wind didn’t reach a secluded corner, and it was always warm and quiet.  
Lio kept coming here to witness a miracle. The miracle didn't have a schedule; only signs. Usually the miracle had to wait until Lio’s thoughts calmed down, until his eyes were fixed on the ripples of waves in the backwaters, until the trees fell silent and rare clouds froze over the mountains. Then pink sparks came up to the surface from the dark depths and converged in patterns resembling of a promare flame. Lio didn't know if it really was a flame, or was it a hoax. He didn’t think about the nature of this phenomenon at all, because he had a child’s belief that explanation would destroy the magic.  
There was no trace left of the scientific bunker: the mountain park was declared a reserve, the ditch was flooded, fish were put in the water and spatter-docks were planted. For the first time Lio came here to find an answer to a question puzzling him from the very day the flame first burst from his hands. He came too late. If there was anything of value left in place of the blown up laboratory, the government skillfully swept over all the traces. Now a lake has spilled here, a living memory of flame once burning inside.  
Somehow, that was enough.  
Far behind, a branch snapped. Galo Thymos made his way through the deadwood like a bear, not trying to hide. Lio could predict his arrival from miles away. Five minutes later, Galo fell ashore, pulling pine needles out of his hair and shaking his sports bag.  
“There you are,” said Galo. “Been looking for you everywhere. Didn’t you freeze?”  
Lio shrugged vaguely. He didn't keep track of the time spent in contemplation, but for him spoke his numb fingers and petrified back. Galo made the right conclusions, extracted a blanket from his bag, and spread it out on the sand. Lio moved closer to him, warming himself on Galo’s brawny side, covered with a sweatshirt on the occasion of the night.  
“Yearning for your flame again,” Galo diagnosed quite skillfully.  
“Didn’t have to freeze while burning,” Lio didn't deny a thing.  
Galo’s palm crept in underneath a jacket and began to rub Lio's back. Fingers pressed accurately and painfully, squeezing his muscles, dispersing blood through veins.  
“All you need is to whistle,” hinted Galo, “I’ll be there to help.”  
‘I missed you,’ translated Lio to himself. Galo didn't follow him, giving as much freedom as needed; Lio didn't know the details of how Galo managed to find him in a secluded shelter, and he didn't want to know. Beacon bracelets are last century. Modern jailers use DNA markers, the network of military satellites is spread on the orbit, and the location of the Burnish is updated in real time. You can’t run from them, you can’t hide. Each time Lio visited the Amnesty Committee he confronted a veiled, carefully disguised threat. It was new to him. No one could threaten him before.  
Galo’s appearance didn't mean a threat. The catch lay in his enveloping attention, soft and loud. Using his formal status of a custodian, Galo surrounded Lio with comfort, gradually convincing that he could be trusted. First, his own mug in Galo’s cramped kitchen, where Lio stayed up late. Then the locker assigned to him in the cloakroom of headquarters, where Lio came to work out a suspended sentence. Bike helmet, decorated in tiger stripes (funny joke, Galo). Then, a bed in his home, a narrow couchette, belonging only to Lio. So that there was a place to crawl out to lick his bites and scratches, when it became clear that everything was not for once, but much more serious.  
Lio folded his lips and whistled thinly. He was mastering this science - somehow there was no necessity before - and the whistle turned out to be weak, barely different from a sigh. Galo rushed up to this sigh, squeezed Lio closer. He used to run high amazingly fast, but did hover when Lio took the lead. Lio enjoyed using it.  
He spent two hours ashore, but no flame came from the depths, and his chest was empty.  
Lio threw his leg over the strong thigh, crumpled a gray sweatshirt in his hands and took the honor of the first kiss upon himself. Galo's lips were predictably cold, hard, curving in cheeky smile, and it was a pleasure to warm them with his breath, and to bite after. Galo was dangerous: in his presence the hair in the scruff of Lio’s neck had been standing on end, and he had been trembling from the accidental touch; even more so from not so accidental. Tea parties in the Galo’s kitchen had ended up breaking a flimsy table on the third evening. The further they got the worse it was.  
Lio insisted on maintaining the appearance of decent communication. Galo didn't seem to mind keeping the appearance, but all the times they had left the locker room together their teammates had looked away. Lio changed lush blouses for turtlenecks, and not for reasons of fire safety at all. His neck could be filmed for a police chronicle. “Lost to the society,” had described their behavior Lucia Fex. The appearance of decent communication didn't last long.  
“You do hide well,” Galo was sharing his observation in the pauses between short kisses, “but I will find you anyway, you know that?”  
“You always do,” Lio confirmed, fighting the turtleneck. It was difficult to get his head out without turning the hair into a fluffy ball.  
Galo stuck his palms under the turtleneck, expanding the collar, so Lio could slip from the synthetic garment.  
“Wanna hear how I knew you were here?” suggested Galo.  
Amnesty Terms. DNA markers. Red dots on the map.  
“Can’t wait,” Lio agreed, shifting Galo’s hand to his fly.  
Galo was in no hurry to answer: he smoothed out Lio’s neck with his tongue, left a new mark in the jugular cavity and carefully, without haste, proceeded to the nipples. The feeling of abandonment and existential loneliness quickly receded into the background, giving way to a dusty haze. A casual glance was enough for Lio to drown; in Galos’ hands he melted like snow and turned into spring.  
“I used to come here too.” Galo finally raised his head off Lio’s chest.  
His saliva dried out, cooling the skin, but Galo rubbed it with his fingers, scratched and rumpled, which reduced Lio's chances to perceive the information critically. Lio made an effort.  
“Really,” he breathed, “before or after there was a lake?”  
“During the lake. It used to be icy. Remember, we fell into it.”  
Lio remembered that flight like a stunning sense of rage. He never got angry at anyone like he did then at Galo. It was good, constructive anger.  
“I remember,” Lio said, and piled on top of him, dropping Galo onto the plaid.  
Galo stretched inertly beneath him. Lio rubbed his hips about Galo and unzipped his hoodie. There was nothing under. Give Galo free will, he would walk naked down the street. It was hard to say what would happen to Lio then. They would have fused into a single whole, because seeing Galo’s naked torso in front of him, Lio felt an all-consuming desire to touch him without taking his hands off.  
But what Lio practiced was discipline and self-control. He laid both hands on the clavicular muscles, touching with his fingertips, and moved down. Galo shuddered. A vein was beating on his explicitly sculpted belly.  
“And what did you do when you came here to the ice lake?” asked Lio, circling around his stomach and sometimes getting his finger under the elastic of sweatpants.  
Galo hovered, beaming at Lio with wide, obscure eyes, as if looking at something precious. Lio sighed and leaned toward him, kissing him softly and sweetly, shallowly; let go off his lip with a draw.  
“I gouged,” Galo concluded with agony in his voice.  
“Sorry, what?”  
“I gouged the ice. With a pickaxe. I got to the five meters, wanted to reach the water. Lio, it’s too much, let's fuck, please.”  
Lio has long ceased to solve the riddle of how you want such a jerk, and took up the second part of the problem: how to not want him (at least sometimes). It turned out with varying success; now, for example, it didn’t.  
He sneaked under the belt of stretched sweatpants and braced Galo’s cock. Another thing Galo didn’t acknowledge was underwear. He was a born nudist, a genius of exhibitionism. Even at their first meeting, he leaned out of his suit, - shirtless, of course, - to shoot Meis and Gueira, defenseless, ardent, lively. Why did it arouse Lio so much? Perhaps because Lio could never do such a thing and preferred to be all buttoned up. Perhaps he just liked beefy male torsos.  
Worst possibility: he liked exactly Galo Thymos.  
If you think about it, sex on the lakeshore fit perfectly into the exhibitionism picture. Lio didn't want to think about it now.  
“In the bag,” Galo said, “I've been at gym. Got some baby cream in case of need.”  
Continuing to jerk him off, Lio pulled up Galo’s bag. There were two bottles in the side pocket. He considered reading the inscriptions in the dark to be below his dignity.  
“Which one of them?”  
“One is a shower gel, the second is a baby cream. With little penguins. My hands dry out of magnesia.”  
“With little penguins,” Lio repeated.  
Tenderness threw a noose around his neck and slowly tightened it. Lio loosened the lacing and tossed off his boots heel by heel, then slipped out of his trousers with sharpened grace; casually jerked Galo’s sweatpants. They got stuck on Galo’s ankles, but no one paid attention to it. First bottle smelled of sea salt and lemongrass. ‘It's a gel.’ Second smelled of nothing. ‘This is a cream. With the penguins.’  
Lio generously squeezed the cream, rubbed it on his palms. Right hand went between the buttocks, crawling in his ass, left hand covered Galo’s dick. Galo’s breathing was fast and shallow.  
“A real smoke eater always has cream in case of need, right?”  
“A smoke eater is someone who is pulled out of a fire. And I'm a fireman,” Galo stood for the professional honor.  
‘Can’t get you out of this fire by the scruff of your neck,’ thought Lio, and sank down on him, without further ado and without a word, biting his lip so as not to give out a shameful, uneven sigh. He could not resist a joke when tension let him go slightly.  
“Burn it, fireman.”  
Galo took a deep breath. He held Lio by the waist, seated to the end, so that the buttocks pressed against his hips. And then he froze.  
“What?” Lio didn't understand.  
He could not track the movement when a perfectly trained professional, reasonably proud of his physical form, bent him and turned them over, laying Lio in a heated place.  
“I have an idea,” said Galo, “what if we try this?”  
And, in contrast to the recent lightning-fast attack, he awkwardly slowly gathered Lio's palms and pressed to his chest.  
“What does it mean?” Lio said hoarsely. His mouth went dry.  
“I want you to come untouched. From me exclusively.”  
A dry mouth instantly filled with saliva.  
“It’ll require some work,” Lio warned, knowing that it sounded like a promise.  
“And I am always ready,” Galo flashed a smile, dropping Lio's heart from mountain height.  
He took Lio under the lower back - his large wide palms felt like a cradle - and boldly embarked on an ambitious project. They haven’t done this before; rather, they did, but in a different configuration. Lio froze for a second, recalling the broken grimace of Galo's eyebrows, his powerless whimper; how long he rushed about, how he caved in under Lio, stretching the pleasure, stretching himself to the limit. How he came, clenching his fists in Lio's grip, throwing his head back and exposing defenseless throat to Lio’s teeth. How long he flaunted the hickeys...  
“Look at me,” Galo asked, jerking Lio back to here and now.  
Something in his voice made Lio open his eyes, and he went numb. Above Galo’s head blossomed a halo, scarlet, purple, gold, shades of everything Lio was lacking so badly. Lio yearned for the flame, yearned quietly, inactively and scary. He was coming here to become what he once was: powerful, omnipotent and whole.  
To understand why the flame happened to him.  
The lights jumped on Galo’s shoulders, leaped from the bridge of his nose to the temple, kissed him on the lips. Lio watched without taking his eyes off. It was a deception of vision or a trick of his exhausted mind - it didn't matter; the only thing important was that he longed for the flame, and the flame was with Galo, was on his side.  
His throat was constricted with spasm. Breath gave through huge effort; Lio smothered with reverence and excruciating pleasure, breaths clung to each rib and fell into the stomach, and then flew back with moans. His parted lips were dry, Galo looked at them, bewitched, and then, having solved some kind of integral in his mind (twice two equal four, Galo), he leaned towards Lio and drew his tongue around the lips.  
As a result of this action, something contracted in Lio’s stomach and cut off white, and Lio groaned, loudly, openly, right into his mouth. Galo gobbled up a moan, begging for more with greedy thrusts, and Lio gave him more, generously dumped a sonorous scattering of sounds. Fucking in an embrace was more convenient: it immediately became clear where to put his hands, Lio clung to Galo’s back and thrust his claws into supple flesh. He spread his legs wider to fit the massive figure covering him. Galo worked his hips, carefully spraying Lio atom by the atom, and almost puffed with zeal. The process of satisfying himself with the help of Galo has always been fascinating, but here and now Lio discovered new meanings in it, infernal abysses and heavenly paradises. As if he was more than one again. As if Galo, his undivided attention, his tongue in Lio's mouth and a dick in his ass, made him full.  
His restrained rattling caress crushed Lio into a lump of naked nerves and put him on sharp shoulder blades. A trembling walked along his hips, an annoying heaviness piled up in his stomach and, not finding a way out, shot his weakened hands and cramped legs with bursting bullets, and, of course, Galo chose this moment to stare at Lio with sincere care and ask intimately:  
“Do you feel good?”  
Well, Lio knew from the very beginning that it would not be easy with him.  
“Pff-aaah-ugh,” Lio said.  
“‘Fuck you,’” translated quick-witted Galo,“I don't want to shock you, Lio, but you know... ”  
‘Just shut up,’ Lio thought with bleeding love, ‘please.’  
He didn't voice this thought as a whole and uttered aloud only the last word.  
“Please what?” specified Galo.  
“Do it,” said Lio, “like back then.”  
About how they kissed back then, Lio only knew from stories, but Galo repeated an encore so many times that Lio had already managed to memorize the mise-en-scene.  
In the engine room of Noah’s ark, on the floor, in his hands.  
When Lio was dying.  
“You don’t die anymore,” said Galo, “you don’t, do you?”  
“Just about to begin,” Lio promised.  
And that was the end of the stupid questions, Galo’s tongue unclenched Lio’s teeth and returned to its proper place, and the flashes in his stomach merged into a continuous line of infinite length, and somewhere ahead - far, far away - Lio crumbled to dust, and now.  
Now he was alive.  
***  
“Told you,” said Galo, glowing with satisfaction.  
“Told me what?” asked Lio.  
He sat with his legs beneath him, stroking Galo’s head, entrusted to his arms, and looked at the lake, where column of small flames was drawing phantasmagoric pretzels out in the water.  
“That it’s gonna be awesome. You looked at me like…”  
“Like how?” mechanically asked Lio.  
“As if you’ve seen in me what I see in you,” Galo answered inexplicably.  
Lio didn't have time to be surprised.  
“Wow. Now, that’s beautiful. I understand why did you choose this side.”  
The back of his head turned: Galo was also looking at the lake. In Lio's head, deafeningly empty, arose slow and reluctant thoughts.  
“You see it too?”  
Galo nodded, rustling his bangs on Lio’s knee.  
“I watched the program about it. These are crustaceans... fluo... fluoc…”  
“Fluorescent?”  
“Right.”  
“They look like the flame,” Lio said, not trying to keep his tone even.  
Galo tensed in his arms, became hotter and more weighty. He extended his arm and pressed Lio on the back of his head. Lio leaned to his lips, imprinting a kiss with a distinct taste of the unspoken words.  
“How would you say this,” Galo sunk into a reverie.  
He no longer pressed, but his hand curled near Lio’s face, twisting a strand around his finger. It smelled of baby cream.  
“Like that cave legend.”  
“What is there in the legend?” Lio asked, not hoping on a serious answer, but Galo was full of surprises.  
“There in a legend people are sitting in a cave and looking at the wall. All kinds of things are carried in front of the fire behind their backs, but people only see the shadows of things in front of them, and they think that this is life.”  
“Yeah.”  
“And real life is those things that they don’t see.”  
“Stunning,” Lio said.  
It seemed like something from the ancient Greeks.  
“I think... you know what’s most important in this?”  
“What?” echoed Lio.  
A particularly desperate flock of fluorescent crustaceans rose to the surface and laid a dashing turn, in which Lio could see the outlines of a dragon.  
“That life is not objects in front of fire,” said Galo thoughtfully.  
He left pauses in his story where Lio could insert a cue if he wanted. Just like the rest. He gave Lio the opportunity to choose between “yes” and “no”; say something or keep silent, be near or pull away.  
“Life is fire itself,” said Lio.  
His chest was held apart by a jack; he sat with his back straight and was afraid to move once again, so as not to burst into tears from an incomprehensible, heavy, overwhelming feeling.  
“For reals,” Galo rejoiced, “so cool that you understand me. On the same wave. Want to get you these crustaceans in a jar?”  
Get crustaceans in the jar. Put it on the windowsill. Move the beds together. I will enroll in your civil defense squad. I will have a uniform, but won’t have no flame. I won’t have a flame, but there will be life, strange, unclear, from someone else's shoulder, there will be a jar with crustaceans on the windowsill and a bed. Our bed. Yes, perhaps this will suit me.  
“Don't want to,” said Lio, “I feel sorry for them. We don’t just kill crustaceans.”  
Galo laughed briefly, prolonging the moment of understanding.  
“Let’s come to my place. I cooked the meat, you’re gonna love it.”  
“Yes,” said Lio, “I will. Let’s go.”


End file.
